This Week’s Must See Events: No Rest for the Weary

Any art nerd who’s dreaming of taking this week off needs to take another look at their calendar. Galleries across the city are opening new shows, and there are plenty of talks too. Between art star Matthew Barney’s tell-all talk with Sir Norman Rosenthal at The 92nd Y this and upcoming talent Sara Cwynar’s show opening at Foxy Production this Friday, you’ll not lack art to see and discuss.

Mon

MoMA

Museum Hours (with introduction by writer and director Jem Cohen)

A quiet movie about a friendship between an American woman who learns a distant relative is in the hospital and a museum guard. No grand revelations occur while looking at art, which generally speaking mimics the role of the museum in the lives of most of us.

AVA

An exhibition that would please author of Perfume, Patrick Suskind; Ehemera: A synesthetic installation combining scent, sound and visual elements. The nose behind this project is Berlin-based Geza Schoen, who is known, according to the press release, for “various avant-garde/conceptual scents.” We’re a little confused about what defines a conceptual scent, but we’re told that musicians Ben Frost, Tim Hecker, and Steve Goodman (aka Kode9) have created sonic raw material which Schoen then reinterpreted to create three different scents: Noise, Drone, and Bass, respectively. These scents, named after sounds, are then used to develop more sounds.

Different days will feature the various sounds and scents, as follows:

Tue

92nd Street Y

Matthew Barney and Sir Norman Rosenthal

29 bucks should be worth hearing Matthew Barney explain his work a little. Known for work that combines sculptural installation, performance art and video, Barney looks at the physical limits of the body and the mutability of sexuality. His films typically work with little to no narrative. Former Secretary of Exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Sir Norman Rosenthal will be interviewing Barney. Rosenthal was the curator behind the controversal traveling exhibition of 1997.

Thu

Gagosian Gallery

Urs Fischer, Last Supper

If you like Pawel Althamer’s Draftsmen’s Congress, where visitors are drawing on the walls in the New Museum, then you’ll probably want to head to Urs Fischer’s two-part show Last Supper. The show will take fired sculptures from his MOCA show, “YES,” an open house where 1,500 volunteers made clay sculptures.

And if you think the show’s “unprecedented directness” smells like bs, then you can at least check out Gagosian’s latest plunder, a brand new uptown space.

Pace Gallery

Adam Pendleton

Adam Pendleton attempts to shed some light on a gun battle that happened almost fifty years ago, between the Black Panther Party and the police. In a recent video, the artist shadows David Hilliard, a founding member and former Chief of Staff of the Black Panther Party, through Oakland. The show was sponsored by SF MoMA; Pendleton presents the video along with silkscreens and painting.

Fri

EFA Project Space

Several Circles

“The circle is simultaneously loud and soft” Kandinsky wrote once in a letter to a friend. He had some authority on the subject; Kandinsky had what’s known as “synesthesia”, a condition often described as “color hearing”. This exhibition takes things a step further by working with a concept of “ideaesthesia; a phenomenon in which concepts evoke perception-like experiences. The explanation of what this means is a little murky in the press release, which offers the scenario of understanding that “mu5ic” actually means “music” as one example but that’s fine. We expect the artists’ work—Joe Brittain, John Cage, Mia Goyette, Vladimir Havrilla, Rachel Higgins, Music Animation Machine (Stephen Malinowski), Mamiko Otsubo, Irgin Sena, Slobodan Stošić, Alina Tenser—will demonstrate show’s thesis.

Curated by Marco Antonini.

Foxy Production

Flat Death, Sara Cwynar

“Kitsch is the means through which complex human experience is distilled down to simple, sentimental motifs and ideas,” Sara Cwynar observes in her ad for Kitsch Encyclopedia. This might explain why, though Cwynar’s photos embody the “fading glamour” of old tchotchkes, their fruity essence still makes us drool. (Disclaimer: we know from our benefit auction).

Theodore Art

Oliver Wasow, Studio Projects

This event gets a write up even though there’s no press release to speak of, because we like the portraits we’ve seen. There’s two in total, but both photographs capture people in front of painted landscapes that appear to be hundreds of years old. It’s a simple juxtaposition of old and new, but it makes the work feel eerie at times.

Signal

Hayden Dunham, Meriem Bennani; Paste

Together, Hayden Dunham and Meriem Bennani have kickstarted their quest to communicate with a parallel world. Now, they will transform Signal Gallery into a site-specific quasi-liquid state. We suspect this may involve seran wrap and plastic, but we can’t be sure until we go; stay tuned.

Sat

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)

Nancy Holt: Daylong Tribute Screening

Land art pioneer Nancy Holt, who passed away in February, is probably best known now for her “Sun Tunnels”: 9-foot-wide tunnels aligned with the sun on the winter and summer solstices, and with holes lining up to constellations. So EAI is paying tribute to her video and film work with a marathon screening of her films and videos. Despite the mega fame of her husband Robert Smithson, Holt is still not known to mainstream audiences. EAI will be showing, among others, “Underscan” (1976), “Revolve” (1977), “Pine Barrens” (1975), and collaborations with Robert Smithson, including “Swamp” (1971) and “East Coast, West Coast” (1969).

The Suzanne Geiss Company

Particular Pictures

What is it about weird specificity, that makes the surreal humor of David Lynch so appealing? “Particular Pictures” might have some answers to that question, with its title lifted from Twin Peaks’ Agent Cooper: “Acetylcholine neurons fire high, voltage impulses into the fore-brain. The impulses become pictures, the pictures become your dream. But no one knows why we choose these particular pictures”.

Curators Joshua Abelow and Emily Ludwig Shaffer have combined works spanning four decades by both emerging and established artists.

Good Work Gallery

First Responders

It’s good to great to see emerging artists like Kyle Petreycik paired with more established names like Ariel Dill and Michael Bell-Smith. According the gallery and curator Zach Smith, “First Responders” brings together work by a group of artists that demonstrates the “primary urge to draw”. Basically, it’s a bunch of work that evolved from sketches and gestures.

Sun

Sargent's Daughters

Dee Ferris, Barnaby Furnas and Annie Lapin

Sargent’s Daughters seems to be living up to its name, with a show of historically-grounded paintings by Dee Ferris, Barnaby Furnas and Annie Lapin. If that means more like Furnas’s epic Moby Dick squeegie paintings last year, then we’ll be happy.

247365 Manhattan

And since it’s in the neighborhood, check out the new show at 247365 Manhattan. Our brains are too puny to understand this press release, but it has something to do with secret messages, rumors about the moon, and a movie scene taking place in “a downloaded 99¢ store on the moon”. Readers might have more luck deciphering this.